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From: Robert D. <rob...@gm...> - 2022-10-17 16:46:27
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GCL has several deficiencies, and continuing to accommodate them is keeping us from implementing various things, aside from being a time sink. Things I can remember at the moment, there may be others. Also, this is aside from dealing with GCL-specific bugs. * wildcards in DIRECTORY -- GCL doesn't behave as expected * compiling pregexp.lisp -- most recent released version can't compile pregexp.lisp; most recent unreleased version doesn't build on my system * ASDF, UIOP, Quicklisp -- doesn't work with GCL * CFFI -- doesn't work with GCL * Unicode characters -- GCL doesn't know about that Someone's going to say, well, nobody needs any of that stuff. I guess that's true, but that's not very convincing, right? "We don't need that" is an all-purpose argument which brings everything to a dead halt if one really believes it. I'd like to get to a place where we can talk about the merits of this feature or that feature, without the conversation immediately getting derailed by "well, GCL doesn't support that." I know we've had similar discussions over the years. This week we have someone volunteering to work on Maxima, so that's what's new. At this point I'd like to discontinue support for GCL in Maxima, and discourage package maintainers from trying to use it, since that will inevitably lead to users reporting non-working features as bugs. Can I get anybody on board with that? FWIW Robert |